What’s up with free multimedia production tools in 2010

Published on December 24, 2010 in Development. 2 Comments

After some thinking how to best serve the dish with what little time I currently have here comes an overview of what was happening with free multimedia production tools during 2010. Read on! :)

There’s a bunch of other publications coming during the holidays season, mostly thanks to a magic gadget I stole borrowed from one vendor. The gadget takes a draft of an article and finalizes it. No more hassle of “dunno if it’s good enough to share”. It’s magic!

Nevertheless, I wish you to simply make the most of this holiday season. Stay tuned for more rants :)

On VST, WINE and all

Published on December 21, 2010 in Development and Sound. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The epic battle against Focusrite Plugin Suite is over and I’m defeated. The problem turns out to be in the license registration prompt that simply refuses to load under WINE, whether you load it in Ableton Live or in Ardour: any signal simply gets bypassed until the plugins are registered. There probably is some WINE conspiracy in support for native effects/instruments SDK over VST :)
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The more the better

Published on December 20, 2010 in Development and Graphics. 7 Comments

As an appendix to the recent rant, the hilarious “Creative Suite for Linux” thread on omgubuntu brought this gem a couple of days ago:

“It [migration from Windows to Linux] will solve many issues. In free software community more users = more contributors. More contributors = better software. Better software = more users.”

Sounds like a dream, eh? Surely at least some of those people using free software want to contribute?

Let’s have look at download stats of Windows build of GIMP. The SourceForge page defaults to a week, and for the current timeframe (Dec 13 2010 to Dec 20 2010) it shows 379,681 downloads. That’s 380K downloads a week, boys and girls.

How about a year? 15,902,245.

So, how many new committed developers appeared in that timeframe? I mean, out of those very nearly 16 millions? 10? 20? 50? Um, no. It’s actually zero. Oh wait, I’m wrong! It’s actually -1, ’cause Martin is rather busy since last spring. The usual amount of people who occasionally do something hasn’t changed.

Now you might argue this is because typical Windows users are this and that, but seriously, there is no direct connection between amount of users and amount of contributors. You can have a very small, yet very focused community like the amazing gis-lab.info guys (sorry, it’s mostly in Russian) who work their ass off to make free GIS tools Just Work™ (and they use different OSes). And you can have a large project that doesn’t gain committed contributors at all despite of being well-known, popular, yadda-yadda… Amount of user base simply doesn’t affect anything directly.

Things we should do better

Published on December 12, 2010 in Development. 3 Comments

Earlier this year I had a meeting with Konstantin Rotkevich, who asked me in a by-the-way fashion how things were going for Inkscape. Some five minutes later he told me: “You know, Alex, every time I ask you this question you tell me some horrible stories about Inkscape, and yet the project strives”. Which is exactly true: many software projects live on the edge of complete and utter failure.

The previous blog posting covered things we don’t really do better than proprietary software vendors and things we actually do better than them. Now let’s talk about our weaknesses. This particular blog posting is loosely based around a rather angry mail I sent to one mailing list recently.
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REX2 is on radar

Published on December 9, 2010 in Development and Sound. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

A while ago we, re-lab project, started clean-room reverse-engineering of REX2 — a rather popular file format of audio loops supported by most DAWs on the market except free/libre ones. Before we started we actually contacted Propellerhead to ask if they are willing to share the spec and got no reply whatsoever. Since Propellerhead has a history of being not quite friendly towards open source projects, and we still want our files supported, thank you very much, we proceeded with reverse-engineereing.

Right now we have several Python scripts to parse .rx2 files and dump contents to stdout. There is also a stub of the spec that we intend to fill ASAP with what we already know. If you have a licensed copy of Propellerhead ReCycle (that is the primary authoring application for REX2) and you want REX2 supported by free audio tools, don’t hesitate to join.

The request for REX2 spec originally came from Paul Davis of Ardour fame, so we expect Ardour to be the first application to support REX2. All the work happens in Gitorious: http://gitorious.org/re-lab/audio.

Things we do better

Published on December 8, 2010 in Development. 5 Comments

One of rather fair questions I keep hearing is what exactly free open source software is better at. Sadly, typical reponses often rely on rather flawed argumentation. So it’s time for a bit of myths breaking.
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Reversed World

Published on December 3, 2010 in Music and Sound. 6 Comments

Sometimes I wonder if we live in a reversed world. It’s quite common to hear ramblings of old guys how youth gets it all wrong and spits on traditions and best practices. Wanna have your thinking pattern broken?

You probably already heard about loudness war and definitely have experienced that yourself unless you are hearing impaired. If you haven’t, go check Wikipedia.

Lately someone noticed that Steinberg, developers of a very popular audio editor called Wavelab, say exactly this of loudness:

“One of the most important steps in the mastering process is to enhance the loudness of a track. Loudness is the listeners’ individual perception of sound levels caused by an audio signal. In commercial productions, high volume levels are an important factor. Unprocessed songs are likely to be too quiet, which is disappointing if songs are published on radio or TV, where louder songs might attract more attention.”

Okay, that’s marketing team talking really. Surely youth thinks along the same lines, eh? Young and clueless, eh? What do they know, right? Well, wrong. This is what Tutsplus wrote in their own take at loudness war just a couple of weeks ago:

“The only real solution is for everyone to turn the volume down. For everyone to co-operate. And that’s a big job. There are no worldwide Volume Police to enforce this. There are no fines for over-compression. There is just the love of music. We all need to agree that dynamics are worth fighting for.”

You nailed it, guys.

Interacting with external audio/MIDI devices on Linux

Published on October 25, 2010 in Sound. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

This May I spent a weekend hunting for the list of apps the allow controlling external audio/MIDI devices on Linux in some way. The list was updated since then several times. Some of the apps are, of course, just SysEx editors with fancy UIs, but there’s more than that.

While answering a related question at ubuntuforums.org yesterday, I thought it would be unfair to make this list available to linuxsound.ru users only. So here is the English version, pure and unadorned, with few pictures.
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On “Sintel”

Published on October 2, 2010 in Movies. 2 Comments Tags: , .

So, in case you’ve been spending last 24 hours under some sort of rock, Sintel short animation movie is available on-line now. There are two interviews with team members already published that I know of: the one with Ton Roosendaal done by Andrew Price and the one with David Revoy done by truly yours.

Naturally, after having viewed the epic several times I couldn’t resist blogging about my personal impression. I actually take pills to prevent that. If only they helped :)
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NLE on Linux and more

Published on September 14, 2010 in Graphics. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been diving into screencasting and video editing lately. Sadly none of currently existing tools quite worked for me.

PiTiVi. Simple and almost all I wanted (I really am not into effects, just fades would do), but latest stable version doesn’t properly render videos that have still images. You need version from Git and most recent GStreamer.

OpenShot. Doesn’t read OGV files from recordMyDesktop, snapping is broken, overall sluggish feeling.

Kdenlive. That’s where my hope was. Doesn’t read OGV as well, but xvidcap sort of worked. Unfortunately the version I have renders heavily unsynced audio and video. In fact, depending on a codec it will render different incorrect versions of original clip.

I’ve seen some other editors and I was genuinely unimpressed.

The solution? Blender’s video sequencer. Even now I can’t believe I’m saying that. I’ve been neglecting Blender as a production tool for quite a long time. I used to say that all this soon-blender-will-do-it-all is just childish. But hey, this morning it took me about 20 minutes to twist my head around some basics concepts and then I just sat down and compiled a short clip and it all rendered like a charm.

The video in question? Oh, it’s just an early experiment :)

This page has more info on the tool, and here is wiki page on the GSoC project.